Poetry Sampler: Books

Running Patterns

“There’s a quiet nobility and hard-won clarity in the poems of Randall Freisinger. Delicate, elegiac but not resigned, he asks that his poems seek the hardest thing: to help him live without delusion. Through their care and precision, these poems sustain us.”

—David Wojahn

Plato's Breath

Freisinger's
new poetry collection is inhabited alike by bright, tangible images and
thoughtful, intricate meditations. Pumpkins, poultry houses, sperm
tests, a vacuum cleaner salesman, a father's damaged brain, an
anatomist's tools, a baby falling from a fourth-story window-all of
these come to the page distinct and palpable. At the same time, the work
finds a central inspiration in theoretical work like Jeremy Rifkin's
social criticism. Poetry of both the mind and the heart, Plato's Breath embraces the power of imagination to transform the ordinary into an extraordinary affirmation of life.

—from the Foreword by Herbert Leibowitz

The poems in Plato’s Breath combine powerful personal narratives with a rich sense of language. They are a pleasure to read—a mixture of drama and noise that gives them an almost three-dimensional palpability. In addition, Freisinger’s attentiveness to the linguistic intricacies of English give testimony to his passion for poetry, both in its making and its celebration.

—Stephen Dobyns

Nostalgia’s Thread

"Freisinger is a poet of insight and originality, and this is one terrific read!"

--Jack Driscoll, How Like An Angel

"[T]his book is less an art critique than it is a literary tour de force."

--Robert Stewart, editor, New Letters

In
Nostalgia's Thread, poet Randall R. Freisinger presents accessible and
provocative meditations on ten of Norman Rockwell's most familiar
images--shedding new light on the work and demonstrating the dynamic
relationship between art and its beholder.

The
poems bear witness to the fact that each cultural era must reinterpret
its rich artistic inheritance within the context of its current
collective experience. With unflinching honesty and deep compassion,
these poems present a personal and national past which is both
comforting and disturbing, both "nostalgia's thread" and "the barbed
wire / of memory".

Hand Shadows

In
these poems Randall R. Freisinger imbues his subjects with their own
life through his verbal equivalents of hand shadows. Replete with loving
and healing gestures, the poems manipulate and thus overwhelm loss. The
poet’s hands transform, counterbalance Death’s sleights of hand.

Here
the Kirby Man’s magician hands lift a suburban woman out of anomie.
The hands of a father cut open a dog to remove the child’s nose it has
swallowed—a real life fairy tale. And the hands of a stranger catch a
baby thrown from a fourth-floor window by her father. If some of these
dramas sound like fantasy, we have only to consult the local news.

Randall
R. Freisinger’s poems are poems of redemption—via memory, via the
loving hands of the poet. May we all be so well caught.